


Sutures

by tortuosity



Series: A Full Bottle and Bones to Break [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Blood, Developing Relationship, F/F, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Medical Procedures, Needles, Past Drug Use, Stitches, wound care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:53:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25860874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tortuosity/pseuds/tortuosity
Summary: Cait only takes care of her own wounds. Usually.
Relationships: Cait/Female Sole Survivor
Series: A Full Bottle and Bones to Break [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1808800
Comments: 8
Kudos: 31





	Sutures

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to @aban_asaara for the prompt! 
> 
> A few notes regarding accuracy:  
> 1\. I've made stimpaks a lot more rare and a lot less powerful.  
> 2\. I'm assuming latex and nitrile gloves would have all deteriorated in the last two hundred years. Suffice it to say, aseptic technique is not followed in the post-apocalypse :p  
> 3\. I've also assumed basic medical supplies like certain analgesics and antiseptics, single-use hypodermic needles, and sutures have made it into the future, though they're not easy to find.
> 
> This fic takes place after ["Ricochet"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24987874/chapters/60499342), but that one just gives some background info; it's not required reading.

Cait only takes care of her own wounds. She’s had plenty of practice; the Combat Zone was one hell of a teacher. 

Fractures: broke her nose more times than she could count, right hooks making purple-red blooms across both cheeks, blood dripping down her lips, the world reduced to a slit from eyes almost swollen shut; cracked knuckles, puffing her fingers up like overstuffed sausages; ribs busted up from catching baseball bats and boots, puncturing phantom holes in her lungs with every breath. All of them she wrapped and taped herself, rigging splints from pipes and cardboard.

Cuts: from homemade shivs to machetes, from shallow lacerations to stabs so deep she could make an anatomy study from the exposed layers of fat and muscle. She washed each one out and stitched the holes shut with her own shaking hands.

And the queen bitch of them all: dislocations. Her right shoulder more than once, and her left knee—the one her parents shattered—more than that. And every time, she’d limp off to some piss-soaked corner, find something to bite down on, and shove the unruly joint back into place. If she was lucky, she could scrounge up a stimpak from somewhere to knit herself back together a bit faster. But that whole “luck of the Irish” bullshit never seems to apply to her.

The Psycho helped.

That was how it was always done, from the very first time she fell and skinned her knees. No older than three, and she was told to take care of it herself, clumsy little shite. She muzzled her crying into sniffles while she picked bits of gravel and broken glass from her flesh. Later, in the slave pens and the fight pit, it was much the same. They were all like animals there, baring teeth and snarling at anyone stupid enough to get close. Injury meant weakness, and weakness meant vulnerability, and vulnerability meant a knife in the back. So instead, she crawled under the metaphorical porch to lick her wounds. Alone.

But that’s not what these people—her new “friends” at Sanctuary—do. When Raiders assaulted their camp and winged that whiny bitch (Marsha? Marcy?) in the arm before Cait had a chance to blow all their goddamn heads off, Preston was there before the bodies were even stiff, plucking buckshot from elbows and slathering on disinfectant. When Danse stumbled home after a tussle with a pack of Gunners with more charcoal than skin inside his beloved tin can armor, Deacon and Hancock popped him free while Curie, no less a robo-doc in her shiny new synth body, fussed over all his crispy bits.

They tried to fuss over Cait, too. Tried; past tense. Mutant clipped her in the side of the head, left her on her back and seeing triple—by the time she could actually see again. And then she felt cool leather and warm skin on each temple. Fingerless gloves. Piper. Piper, tutting with concern and telling her to keep still. Three Pipers, cringing as blood leaked between their fingertips. Cait could not abide. With her head feeling like a water-filled basketball, moldy black spots splattering the edges of her vision, she jerked away from Piper and her kindness. Cait got to her feet, lurched backward until she had the comfort of a wall behind her, and she was the hurt dog once more, growling, “Don’t touch me.”

Piper listened. She didn’t touch her again after that. And neither did anyone else.

Cait doesn’t touch them, either. There’s a barrier between her and the others, one she’s happy to keep shored up with bitterness and distrust. She’ll point her gun where they tell her, she’ll kill their enemies, but when the fight’s done, so is she. They can handle their own skinned knees.

Maria, though. That’s different. (And isn’t it always with her?)

She’s too damn much like Cait; that’s the problem. Life, that eternal merciless fucker, has taken its toll on her, too, wearing her down to the bone, callousing her body and mind. Unlike Cait, she’ll tend to others if they need it, patching them up with a grim battlefield practicality, giving no words of comfort, nothing more than the bare necessities to keep infection at bay. But they’re never allowed to return the favor. Maria hides her pain behind a stoic mask, buttoned up to the throat in public, straight-backed, dead-eyed.

The Med-X helped.

Maria, as a rule, accepts no assistance, and Cait, as a rule, offers no assistance. But time and proximity worked to bend those rules, and Vault 95 broke them entirely, dissolving the shitty coping mechanisms they used to glue themselves together, revealing cracks from the surface all the way down to their foundations.

Maybe that’s why, for the first time, Cait asks to fix up a cut that’s stained half of Maria’s shirt red with blood and why, for the first time, Maria allows it.

Still, she wouldn’t let Cait so much as look at it until they were back in Goodneighbor, sequestered in their usual room at the Rexford. Only when the deadbolt slides into place does Maria finally acknowledge her discomfort: the tiniest of grimaces, a blink held a half-second too long, and a barely audible “Okay.”

Cait nods, and Maria settles onto the bed in the robotic, gingerly way of someone valiantly trying to avoid showing just how awful they feel. The attack was quick. A gang jumped them halfway between Diamond City and Goodneighbor, no doubt thinking two women alone at night would be easy pickings. The pair were several blocks away from the corpses before Cait noticed the injury. Maria shrugged off Cait's concern at the time, but the blood spreading steadily over her lower back proved hard to ignore.

Maria pressure wrapped it along the way—only after Cait refused to stop badgering her about it—and that’s the first thing Cait sees when she sits behind Maria and lifts up her shirt: white gauze and a whole lot of red. There’s a sharp ripping sound; Maria’s removing the tape securing the wrap at her front. Cait grabs the loose end Maria passes back and starts unwrapping, layer by layer, like opening the world’s crappiest present. She meets some resistance at the end—some of the blood’s congealed and dried, less carmine and more mahogany, and it’s got the gauze sticking.

Maria holds her breath. Cait pulls, gently, letting the wrap flutter onto the floor, and hopes she didn’t take too much skin with it. What greets her underneath is a four inch-long vertical gash to the left of Maria’s spine, deeper at the top than the bottom. A knife, then. Reverse grip, downward arc. Maria must have sensed it coming and ducked away before it landed between her shoulder blades. It’s a clean cut, at least: smooth edges, no pus yet, easy to stitch. And it’ll certainly need stitching. The wound goes right down into the muscle, a glistening red canyon of meat. Impressive. For Maria, not the raider. The raider was a fucking amateur.

“Alrighty then,” Cait announces. “Bastard got you good, but it looks like he didn’t nick anythin’ too important.” She watched another poor slob at the Combat Zone take a knife to the guts once. That’s a smell you never forget. “I can take care of it. But this shirt’s gonna have to come off. Needs to be washed and patched, anyway.”

“Not quite how I expected this moment would go,” Maria mutters, close to laughter, and thank God she can’t see the blush burning a trail up Cait’s neck. They’ve had their share of fooling around since that first reckless, endorphin-fueled kiss on the floor of Vault 95’s detox room, but this, Cait thinks, tugging the ruined shirt up and over Maria’s head, feels far more intimate.

“Yeah, well, this isn’t exactly my idea of a romantic evenin’, either. Lay down.”

First thing’s first. Cleanliness is next to godliness, or so they say, and Cait’ll be damned if she’s gonna sew through whatever crusty grime the Commonwealth has seen fit to bestow on Maria’s skin. She pops the cap off a bottle of reasonably clean water and uses it to soak a reasonably clean blouse she lifted from the room next door. Once Maria’s on her stomach, the fabric goes from blue to purple as Cait wipes away the dried blood and grit smeared halfway up her back.

It’s subtle, but Maria tenses up like she’s holding back a flinch every time Cait passes over a particular spot—a spot several inches away from the actual wound. Eventually, a mottled scar surfaces from beneath the dirt. Paler brown than the surrounding skin, a glossy ridge settled into the valley of Maria’s lower back, neatly dotted on each side with the ghosts of pre-War staples. Every scar has a story, and Cait knows the tale behind this one: betrayal. A common theme in Cait’s own life, one she hoped was less common in that mystical time before the bombs. It was a naive assumption. People are shite. Always have been, always will be.

It’s difficult to keep herself from touching it any more than she has to. Such a straight, tidy thing, a portrait of pre-War luxury. Cait’s seen a few injuries like the one that led to that elegant scar here in post-War hell. You suffer, and then you die. No exceptions.

“Aw, the surgery scar’s gonna have a sibling,” says Maria, her voice muffled by the pillow.

“An ugly sibling,” Cait admits, tossing the bloodied blouse away to join the other shirt on the floor. She opens the leather satchel containing her rudimentary first aid kit and spreads its contents across the scratchy gray blanket covering the bed. “I’ve had no proper trainin’, just what I’ve learned from workin’ on myself. I can stitch you up, but it won’t be pretty, I’ll tell you that now.”

“Hey, as long as you don’t kill me, do your worst.”

“Is that an invitation? And here I thought we were gettin’ along so well.”

Cait spreads some antiseptic over the wound and, after a minor struggle, manages to peel away the plastic film from the syringe. The idiot raiders she used to run with think military sites are the only places worth scavenging, but the real deal is hospitals. The greatest weapons stockpile in the world won’t mean a damn thing if you’re dead or your arms have rotted off from infection. 

All that remains of her last foray into Mass Bay sits scattered on the bed beside her. It’s not much. Three months ago, the idea of wasting her hard-earned supplies on another was beyond absurd.

She draws the last of her anesthetic into the syringe.

It occurs to Cait that explaining what she’s doing might be the compassionate thing to do while Maria is effectively blind and at her mercy. “Gonna numb you up a bit before I start sewin’. The injections’ll hurt, but not as much as it hurts to get stitches without them.” She remembers the first time she tried to stitch up her leg and shudders. “Trust me. Oh, and don’t get too excited. It’s just lidocaine.”

“C’mon doc, you’re sure you don’t have anything stronger?” Maria quips, but her voice comes out tight and her breathing is becoming shallower, more deliberate; Cait can feel it where her left palm rests on Maria’s back. The adrenaline must be wearing off, and pain has arrived to take its place.

The joke is a morbidity few would feel comfortable indulging. Cait does. “Cute. At least we know you’re not afraid of needles, eh?” she counters, then drives the point home before Maria can make any more smartarse remarks, right into the skin at the top left corner of the cut.

Maria, to her credit, makes no sound besides the faint hiss of a surprised exhale.

“Five more,” Cait says and moves the needle down an inch. “This is all the anesthetic I have, so try being less shite next time we’re in a fight, would you?”

“Excuse you.” Maria’s huff of disapproval morphs into a grunt as Cait makes injections two and three. “The only reason _your_ back isn’t sliced up right now is because I was covering your six.”

“‘Coverin’ your six?’ Is that Army for ‘starin’ at your arse?’ No wonder you blokes couldn’t win the war.” And there’s number four.

“God, I _wish_ I could’ve spent four tours staring at women’s asses. Would’ve made things a lot more bearable.”

Five. “Poor lass,” Cait says, singsong. “She only has _my_ arse to look at all day, every day. How will she ever survive?” Shot number six in the top right corner finishes the job; with any luck, Maria won’t feel a damn thing now. “There, all done.”

“Already?” Maria cranes her head around to look at Cait, disbelief evident in her expression. “Shit, that’s a hell of a lot easier than veins. Where did you learn to do all this, anyway?”

Cait tells her. Everything from the skinned knees to the broken noses to the stab wounds the night Stratton left her to die, so numerous she swore she could feel the wind blowing through her while she bled out on the ground. All those backhanded gifts, those lessons learned the hard way, the only way Cait seems to be able to learn anything. They’ve left her like they’ve left Maria: walking scar tissue, rough, inflexible, flawed. Cait moves through the world in a body torn apart—by herself, by others—and put back together countless times, inhabited by a soul thrice damned and a mind wired wrong from birth. But she is alive, and Maria is alive, and maybe that’s all that matters.

By the time Cait’s done spilling her secrets (how many does she have left?), turning herself inside out, Maria has a neat, if somewhat crooked seam of sutures. Cait privately marvels at how much easier it is when Psycho—or its withdrawal—isn’t there to make her hands tremble.

“You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you,” Maria murmurs; no sarcasm, only genuine awe. It’s enough to make Cait’s face light up again.

Under the glow of the lamp she dragged over earlier, Cait’s body casts harsh shadows across the landscape of bare skin beneath her. Well, what’s one more surprise? In what she’d later ascribe to a fit of sentimental madness, Cait leans over and presses her lips to the base of Maria’s neck, just beneath the tips of her black hair. She smiles. There’s something soft and unblemished on the other side of their scars, even if it only appears behind locked doors.

Maria shivers, sighs, and Cait traces goosebumps with her fingertips, away from the pre- and post-War juxtaposition on Maria’s lower back to the more untouched planes of her shoulders. The muscles there yield to her touch, relaxing for the first time in days. A few more fits of madness, a few more kisses, until Maria loses patience and rolls over.

“I’ve still got to put a bandage on it, you git!” Cait protests in the few moments when Maria’s mouth isn’t on hers, but it’s too late.

Cait only takes care of her own wounds. Usually.


End file.
